Second-year Liberal Arts student Luna Kramer-Jamet is the 2026 winner of the Liberal Arts Brick Books Poetry Prize. Her winning sonnet, Winter on Rue Duluth, was published in the Liberal Arts Anthology, an annual student publication that has been produced for more than 25 years. As part of the prize, Luna also received the books published by Brick Books last year.

“The main goal of my sonnet was to capture a small moment frozen in time, where all the unpleasant worries and stresses of the real world are eclipsed by the mundane beauty of a snowy, laughter filled street,” Luna said. “I also just really love Montreal and its streets and architecture and people, so I wanted to create vivid imagery that speaks to how I view Montreal.”

Luna likened writing a sonnet to solving a puzzle and reflected on the unique creative experience she shared with her classmates.

“Because of this constant search for words, me and some friends got in the habit of working through our sonnets out loud in the Peace Garden as a sort of trial/performance. Although we each wrote our sonnets individually, poetry kind of became a group activity, which is a very different way of writing than I was used to, and the congenial nature of this technique was just so much fun.”

Before taking the class, Luna thought poetry was pretentious and unpleasant to read.

“I’ve found that I love poems that prioritize clear, vivid imagery over flowery language and deep metaphors,” she said. “I’ll often find myself marveling at Montreal, our city of poems. I’ll stop in front of murals to read poems that take up an entire wall and go to poetry readings and maybe I’ll write some more verse soon. Overall, I’ve just become more of a fan of poetry, mostly since I now realize how much emotion and joy go into creating it.”

Luna, who would like to explore writing plays in the future, says Dawson’s Liberal Arts program “opens your eyes to just how much knowledge there is in the world to acquire.” For students considering the program, she suggests asking themselves how much they want to learn on their own.

The Liberal Arts Brick Books Poetry Prize is awarded to a student in the second-term Liberal Arts poetry class who shows promise in poetry writing, as reflected in work completed in class and in a formal invitation to write a sonnet.

Other student poets received honourable mentions, and their poems also appear in the Liberal Arts Anthology: Leo Ryan, Sam Yeager, Simon Jaffary Osowski, Sara Caguenas, Tennessee Draper, and George Arkolakis.

English faculty member Susan Elmslie, Liberal Arts Coordinator Beverly Sing, and Alayna Munce, Publisher at Brick Books, say: “The sonnet is not the only measure of promise in poetry writing, but it’s a significant indicator.”